the mattress, 1963

The family's aesthetic, one generation up, in the color of a bedroom. The 1963 master bedroom where James Sr. tears the marriage bed apart is done "white and blue and powder-blue," the coverlet powder-blue, the carpet blue — and that palette is the system's, carried forward: the same blue-decor scheme resurfaces a generation later in Charles Tavis's waiting room (102), the household's visual signature persisting across the succession like a marker. It's a small thing, a color scheme, but it's the kind of continuity the anthology keeps finding — the system reproducing itself not only in phobias and operations but down to the shade of the walls, the aesthetic handed forward from the grandparents' Sepulveda bedroom to the usurper-uncle's Enfield anteroom.